CLIENT CASE STUDY

Schneider Electric: Launching the largest EU Saleforce implementation

Discover how Accenture helped Schneider Electric launch the largest Salesforce implementation in Europe, enabling 26,000 users in more than 100 countries.

Overview

Schneider Electric is a $20 billion worldwide leader in energy management solutions with more than 100,000 employees in 120 countries. Headquartered in Rueil-Malmaison, France, Schneider specializes in electrical energy transmission and automation.

Accenture helped the company launch the largest Salesforce implementation in Europe to date, enabling 26,000 users in more than 100 countries and covering five business processes (sales, marketing, customer care, issue-to-prevention and services).

With Accenture delivering on time and within budget, the majority of the work was completed within 24 months, and it has shown value in increasing cross-selling and accelerating solution selling for the client.

The Salesforce cloud-based solution gave Schneider a 360-degree view of customers and an unprecedented level of collaboration between its business teams. The results included:

Training satisfaction at 95 percent.

An overall adoption rate of 70 percent.

An average adoption rate of five connections per week.

Quarterly and monthly releases delivered with more than 20 percent of cross-selling.

Six business processes deployed to more than 26,000 users in 100 countries within 18 months.

Opportunity

A changing business model and a number of mergers and acquisitions created fragmented business processes for Schneider Electric, including disparate systems around the world.

To sustain its expansion plans, Schneider decided to align the front-office processes of its business units and enhance collaboration by deploying a single customer relationship management (CRM) solution worldwide.

The company launched a global initiative to deploy a unified CRM experience, improving process efficiency, cross selling and collaboration across sales and opportunity management, marketing, customer service and quality management.

After investigating several tools the company selected Salesforce.com's suite of cloud-based CRM applications based on its ability to deploy a unique CRM solution to the company’s 26,000 end users worldwide. Using a cloud technology such as Salesforce.com would allow the client to have a single global body for its CRM.

Using a cloud technology such as Salesforce.com would allow the client to have a single global body for its CRM.

Solution

Schneider asked Accenture to help with the implementation because of our reputation for delivering quality results quickly, as well as our strong cost model and our Global Delivery Network.

Schneider set an ambitious goal for Accenture to design, implement and deploy the Salesforce solution to more than 25,000 end-users in more than 100 countries within 18 months.

Accenture provided an industrialized approach to deploy the solution worldwide and drive business value realization through adoption and change. This approach, which used the rapid deployment toolkit, allowed for the deployment of several sequences of countries in eight to 12 weeks.

The Accenture team based the deployment strategy on maximizing value creation with the rapid deployment of a core light CRM solution, which provided six functionalities:

Case management

Sales force efficiency

Account management

Opportunity management

Real time commercial business intelligence

Collaboration capabilities for front office teams

Results

For Schneider employees and leadership, the program enriched customer knowledge stored, structured and shared across the company and enhanced day-to-day collaboration on key business data and standard business interactions and sales methodology.

The program also simplified reporting to improve sales representatives’ day-to-day activity and to identify strategic and operational key business indicators.

Schneider Electric also signed an extension of Accenture’s service to provide partner relationship management and field services that will accelerate its switch to digital, making the solution available to more than 100,000 partners and 2,000 field engineers.

...This project has already demonstrated a valuable ROI by increasing cross-selling and account coverage by more than 20 percent each and generating an impressive 70 percent adoption rate.

Philippe Trichet

Senior Vice President of Customer Experience and CRM at Schneider Electric.